La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family

CHAPTER ONE: ON JACKSON STREET (Part II)

Home in Gary was a small, plainly furnished onestory house. It had just two bedrooms, one for the boys and one for our parents; a living room with an alcove, where Rebbie and I slept; a bathroom; a dining room; a kitchen; and a small yard. It was simple and nondescript, but we were comfortable there and never felt that we were poor or in any way deprived.

Contrary to the Jackson our neighborhood was no ghetto. Gary is a northern steel-industry town, and booming postwar prosperity drew many blacks from the South. The city boasted clean, comfortable residential neighborhoods like the one we lived in. Our schoolmates' parents were lawyers, teachers, and blue-collar workers.

Even so, Joseph decreed that we were not to socialize with other kids. He and my mother believed that our futures depended on education, hard work, and strict discipline. Most parents do the best they can with their kids at home, then send them out into a world full of negative influences and pray for the best. My father took no chances. He banished the outside world from our home until our home became our world. It's easy to understand a parent's desire to protect his youngsters, but Joseph took this to an extreme.

No Jackson child could ever be spoiled. Weekday mornings began at around five, when our father rose for work and stomped through the house, waking everyone. We climbed from bed, half-asleep, then set to our chores. "If I have to work," he reasoned, "they have to work too." Even in nasty weather, he forced my brothers to rake leaves outside, shovel snow, or perform pointless tasks like stacking and unstacking piles of bricks before school.

Being the eldest, Rebbie assumed the role of second mother, helping with the littler kids, while the rest of us took turns washing dishes, ironing, and cleaning. One of my jobs was to help Mother cook, because according to Joseph, "You're a girl, and you belong in the kitchen, so you'd better learn how to make cornbread." I oiled the pans for the muffins and cornsticks. It's an irony of adulthood that you manage to forget much of what you were forced to learn as a child. Today I couldn't cook a pan of cornbread if my life depended on it!

After eating breakfast, dressing, and brushing our teeth, we obediently lined up in size order like little stairsteps. Mother checked everyone's teeth, while Joseph followed her down the line like a general inspecting his troops, dispensing spoonfuls of cod-liver and castor oils. Then Mother passed out apples, to kill the vile taste. I don't know why, but I just couldn't stomach the oils. I'd go, "Ptui!" and spit them out. So my father forced my mouth open and spooned them in again, laughing all the while. It was in moments like these that I sensed in him an almost sadistic pleasure in his children's suffering. He seemed incapable of sympathy.

Following school we had to come directly home. No dawdling to talk to our classmates and no visiting their homes. It may surprise you that until very recently I could look back and honestly say I didn't regret not having friends. Perhaps if I'd been an only child it would have been different. But with so many siblings, I was never lonely, because there was always something going on. Since we weren't permitted out, my brothers, my sisters, and I passed our free time playing games Mother invented and singing the songs she taught us: "You Are My Sunshine," "Cotton Fields," "Danny Boy," and anything by Harry Belafonte; there must have been hundreds of others. Mother has an exquisite voice and once wanted to be in show business herself, but I think self-consciousness about her limp held her back. Because her father liked country-and-western music, she grew up listening to The Grand Ole Opry on the radio. To this day my mother's favorite singer is country star Floyd Cramer.

Even at that young age we all harmonized beautifully. It just came naturally to us. So many times. our father straggled in from the mill, and Mother told him excitedly, "You won't believe the boys, Joseph. They make perfect harmony. It's amazing!" Where most other fathers might have at least feigned enthusiasm or offered to listen, Joseph reacted with complete disinterest. My father is basically a quiet man. Except for when he reprimanded or teased us, he acted like we didn't exist.